Spitzer and Legislature Sprint to Finish Line

ALBANY, June 21 — Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s first legislative session was coming to a fractious close on Thursday night, as he and top lawmakers failed to reach agreement on a wide range of issues as they rushed to finish business for the summer.

There appeared to be agreement on a small number of measures. One required suspects indicted on rape charges to take H.I.V. tests. Another expanded Family Health Plus, a state-financed health insurance program, to businesses, in the hope of covering more New Yorkers.

The Legislature also was expected to pass a bill waiving the sales tax on clothing and footwear in New York City and did pass another significantly expanding a program in the city that gives tax incentives for building affordable housing, though it was not clear where the governor stood on the issues.

The Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, the state’s top Republican, said Mr. Spitzer, a Democrat, held up talks on a variety of other issues because he wanted the Senate to accept his sweeping proposal to toughen campaign finance laws.

“Nothing else can move unless it gets done their way,” Mr. Bruno said of the administration, asserting that the governor’s proposal would turn New York into a one-party state. “That one party wasn’t intended to be Republican, in case anybody was wondering,” he said.

But Mr. Spitzer attributed the breakdown in part to the Senate’s demands for money for projects that he said were “dripping fat.” He pledged that deals would eventually be reached on other issues, “because one of the things people know about me is that I’m dogged.”

“We will not take our marbles and run from the field,” he said.

The sudden collapse of the negotiations came after it had appeared that agreements were close at hand on a number of significant measures. After lunch, for example, Mr. Spitzer said he expected an agreement to create a commission to study Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s contentious plan to charge motorists to enter Manhattan below 86th Street, an idea known as congestion pricing.

The proposal, part of a broad plan by the mayor to improve air quality and ease traffic, has faced particularly strong opposition from Assembly Democrats, who have raised concerns that the plan would increase traffic in some neighborhoods and hurt poor and middle-income drivers in other boroughs.

The legislation would have created a commission to study how revenue from the program would be used, the impact of traffic on communities outside central Manhattan and ways the rules would be enforced. It would have also required that the commission submit a report by the fall and that the Legislature vote on it by next Feb. 15. The city would not be allowed to impose the fee until after that vote.

But the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, said there was “no agreement on anything.” The mayor, he added, “does not want anybody else’s view considered on the entire issue.”

Mr. Bruno and city officials said they were hopeful the plan could still be salvaged, though it seems unlikely that one would come together in time to qualify for as much as $500 million in federal aid. The Bush administration has said it could grant the money to New York if it puts the plan in place by midsummer.

All three sides — the governor, the Senate and the Assembly — had also been in broad agreement that the state should start collecting and storing DNA from people convicted of all crimes; currently DNA is collected from people convicted of all felonies and a few misdemeanors. But a deal was scuttled because the sides could not agree on provisions sought by the Democratic-led Assembly, including creating a commission to investigate cases involving DNA exonerations.

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Discussions also apparently collapsed on a plan to bolster oversight of the network of public authorities, like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Empire State Development Corporation, that control much of the state’s debt.

On the H.I.V. testing bill, both Mr. Spitzer and the Republican-led Senate supported the measure, but it had been a subject of contentious debate in the Assembly, where opponents raised concerns about civil liberties and creating a false sense of security in victims if there were a false negative test result.

Michael Kink, legislative counsel for Housing Works, the AIDS service and advocacy group, said, “It’s a misguided measure that actually threatens the health of rape survivors in order to score easy political points.”

But Assemblywoman Nettie Mayersohn, a Queens Democrat who sponsored the bill, said, “What I’m trying to do is make people understand that this is not about civil liberties; it’s about public health.”

The Legislature also approved an expansion of New York City’s property tax abatement, known as 421-a, for developers who include subsidized housing in new buildings.

The legislation, supported by Mr. Bloomberg and the City Council, calls for significantly extending the areas of the city in which developers must make one of every five new apartments affordable to lower-income people in order to take part in the 421-a tax incentive program. Under the current program, only developers in central Manhattan and areas along the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront in Brooklyn were required to earmark such units to receive the incentives.

The bill appeared to be in some peril on Thursday after the Assembly approved a different version, championed by Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, a Brooklyn Democrat. His bill added new neighborhoods where developers must build affordable housing to qualify for the break, including some, like Crown Heights, that have not been reached by gentrification.

His bill would require the subsidized apartments to be made available to families at a lower income level than is currently specified by the law, and would require paying prevailing wages to workers employed in the buildings. But it would offer a significant concession to Forest City Ratner Companies, the developer of the Atlantic Yards project near Downtown Brooklyn. Forest City Ratner was the development partner in building a new Midtown headquarters for The New York Times Company.

Under current plans, the 16 Atlantic Yards buildings are to include 2,250 subsidized rental apartments among more than 6,000 condominium and rental units. Several of the buildings contain no subsidized housing at all, but Mr. Lopez’s bill would allow those buildings to qualify for the tax break so long as the overall complex contains 20 percent subsidized housing. It also would allow Forest City to offer some subsidized apartments to families with higher incomes than would otherwise qualify under the new law.

Together, the changes have drawn concern from some housing advocates and city officials. But the Senate approved the measure on Thursday night.

“The city contemplated whether it needed to do this and concluded that it did not, that Atlantic Yards should get a tax break for a building that has 20 percent affordable, but that the condo buildings should pay property taxes,” said Brad Lander, director of the Pratt Center for Community Development. “It achieves no additional affordability at Atlantic Yards but costs the taxpayers $100 million.”

Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Spitzer and Legislature Sprint to Finish Line. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe